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the wind on the moon
Tuesday, 2 September 2008 02:19 pmSaturday night saw Cape Town hit by a serious storm, causing me to lie awake in bed at 2am listening to the wind roar and the hail spatter on the roof, in a state of unholy glee. Enormous waves apparently pelted various bits of the coastline including Kalk Bay, where the water overwhelmed Polana, the restaurant on the harbour. In the Department of Gosh The Transitory Nature Of All Things, we ate at Harbour House, which is above Polana, about a month ago. Rather amazing photos here and here. Hurricane Gustav it ain't, but it was quite a storm.
In other news, apparently I may well be getting headaches from my contact lenses because they're correcting the shortsightedness but not the astigmatism, whereas the glasses get both. This is causing me a bit of WTF, on account of how I wasn't actually aware that I was astigmatic. I'm a bit miffed at this: presumably my otherwise rather sweet optician has been patiently documenting the astigmatism on my record for the, oh, six or seven years I've been going to him, without actually telling me. I'm also getting weird blur in my left eye about which he is Baffled, Watson, Baffled, causing me to toddle off on Friday to see an ophthalmologist. Which is a word which is very difficult both to spell and to pronounce.
Today's subject line brought to you courtesy of random meteorological associations. The Wind on the Moon is a truly marvellous 1940s children's book by Eric Linklater, featuring the exceptionally badly-behaved sisters Dinah and Dorinda, who end up transforming themselves into kangaroos in order to infiltrate the local zoo. Later they break the puma out of the zoo and stow away in a furniture van with her and their dancing master to rescue their father from the clutches of Hulagu Bloot, the evil dictator of Bombardy. Apart from the seductively evil cadences to the name "Hulagu Bloot", the book offers a particularly insane, comic, subversive, anarchic adventure in which absurd logic becomes curiously matter-of-fact - it's one of my favourites of classic children's literature. My edition has pictures by Nicholas Bentley, which is an added bonus. Linklater also wrote The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea, which has different characters but a similar mood and tone, and features the lines of latitude and longitude as giant cables laid along the sea bed, knotted at their intersections, and maintained by an undersea army of drowned sailors led by Davy Jones.
In other news, apparently I may well be getting headaches from my contact lenses because they're correcting the shortsightedness but not the astigmatism, whereas the glasses get both. This is causing me a bit of WTF, on account of how I wasn't actually aware that I was astigmatic. I'm a bit miffed at this: presumably my otherwise rather sweet optician has been patiently documenting the astigmatism on my record for the, oh, six or seven years I've been going to him, without actually telling me. I'm also getting weird blur in my left eye about which he is Baffled, Watson, Baffled, causing me to toddle off on Friday to see an ophthalmologist. Which is a word which is very difficult both to spell and to pronounce.
Today's subject line brought to you courtesy of random meteorological associations. The Wind on the Moon is a truly marvellous 1940s children's book by Eric Linklater, featuring the exceptionally badly-behaved sisters Dinah and Dorinda, who end up transforming themselves into kangaroos in order to infiltrate the local zoo. Later they break the puma out of the zoo and stow away in a furniture van with her and their dancing master to rescue their father from the clutches of Hulagu Bloot, the evil dictator of Bombardy. Apart from the seductively evil cadences to the name "Hulagu Bloot", the book offers a particularly insane, comic, subversive, anarchic adventure in which absurd logic becomes curiously matter-of-fact - it's one of my favourites of classic children's literature. My edition has pictures by Nicholas Bentley, which is an added bonus. Linklater also wrote The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea, which has different characters but a similar mood and tone, and features the lines of latitude and longitude as giant cables laid along the sea bed, knotted at their intersections, and maintained by an undersea army of drowned sailors led by Davy Jones.
